


Death Deals

by gadgets



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Collars, Eye Trauma, Implied/Referenced Sex, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Minor Character Death, Poison, Possessive Behavior, Scarification, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-30
Updated: 2011-09-30
Packaged: 2019-08-22 10:00:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16595729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gadgets/pseuds/gadgets
Summary: Leonard McCoy, being a man of genius and good taste, makes deals.





	Death Deals

**Author's Note:**

> The sexual assault warning is not for either main character, but it's not the sort of line I want to have in without a warning.
> 
> Originally posted on my Livejournal.

Leonard McCoy, being a man of genius and good taste, makes deals.

McCoy deals in death and pain like it’s a drug. On this ship, in this universe, maybe it is. It doesn’t really matter.

He trades sedatives, poisons, even treatment for favors. He’s treated a woman from the Science department who has all the marks of sexual assault and none of the skill with a blade to protect herself, hands her a diagnosis for insomnia after a hushed conversation and doesn’t care whether or not she actually uses the sedatives on herself. He ignores missed appointments when the girl from phaser control comes in, slips her names as he gives her booster shots, and he’s completely unsurprised when other members of the crew come in to sickbay, flesh burnt from overloaded and poorly wired phasers.

He prefers them that way, half-alive and screaming. Sometimes he lets them heal, gives them a sharp-toothed smile and whispers “ _You owe me_ ” when sickbay is quiet. Sometimes he lets them think they might make it before he comes in, injects them with a poison that makes them feel like they’re burning all over again. (His favorite had scratched out his own eyes.) Other times, he sedates them, makes it so they can’t feel their burns or the scratch of his knife… and then he makes them watch.

“There is nothing,” he says conversationally, checking and re-checking the restraints on the biobed before moving to pick up an old, archaic, but absolutely spotless scalpel, “quite like watching yourself being cut open and not being able to do anything about it.”

He knows this firsthand. If any of his patients were to look at his right pectoral, they would see the name carved over his heart.

Not, he reflects, making the first incision and watching eyes go wide with fear as they realize that _holy shit he isn’t kidding_ , that it would help them.

Their Captain has never been the most helpful of men. McCoy, for all the manipulation, the dealing in pain and death that he does, is practically a saint in comparison.

Of course, his ties run deep. Everyone in the crew needs medical attention, everyone shows up in his domain eventually, and a promise thrown aside is _not_ something that happens very often anymore. His skill with a blade is too famed for that, his network of favors (not allies, because for him, most of them are disposable, and _certainly_ not friends) twisting through the ship like a coil of serpents. He is far from liked, of course, but he’s useful and he’s feared.

He’s also envied and hated, and that’s where the scars, the marks of possession that James Tiberius Kirk has scrawled on his body with knives and teeth and blood, _do_ help him.

\--

He’s been ambushed in the halls, dragged through a door by _four_ gorillas from security to where a lieutenant he vaguely (mostly because he just had a fist connect with his skull several times) recognizes as being Bailey from Navigation. That idiot had been promoted to bridge duty, and McCoy hadn’t exactly made it a secret that he thought he couldn’t snuff it. Jim hadn’t enjoyed that, but had just said they would “wait and see”.

One of the ones Jim likes. Leonard has a feeling Bailey has no idea just what he’s throwing away with this little stunt. Idiot. He’s fucking blind.

Two of the gorillas have him by the arms, keeping him from grabbing anything on his person. When his class ring scratches one of them, he doesn’t even flinch, though his grip on McCoy tightens. Leonard spits blood out at Baileys feet, rolls his eyes when one of the members of Security is sent out to guard the door and smirks when the fourth presses his phaser into the back of his skull. Bailey is talking, but he isn’t really listening; just smirking lazily, gaze sharpening when the idiot pulls out a knife and starts to cut away his shirt from the bottom.

He doesn’t care what Bailey has to say. He’s waiting for the reaction-

“What’s this?”

A note of curiosity; he’s stumbled across the lower part of one of the letters. His shirt is torn away, and then that note of curiosity turns into one of panic.

“ _Shit_!”

Just then, the guard holding onto his arm falls over. The one at his back pauses, and it’s all the time Leonard needs before punching the other guard in the face.

This time, his ring cuts across an eye, and Bailey is scrambling back to the other side of the room, because it’s damn obvious that his ring is more than just a shiny piece of metal, and the name of their Captain written on his chest isn’t coincidence.

“Tetrodotoxin,” McCoy offers, kicking the guard who is clutching at his eye. “Found in various natural sources back on Earth. A cure is still hard as hell to come by.” He nods toward the other guard now, smirk fresh, sharp as the blades he wields but much less careful. “He might live, if he’s lucky.”

The remaining guard tries to run from the room and runs face-first into the knife Jim is holding. The guard outside the door is slumped over, unconscious; Jim will tell him, later, that he gave the others up, but that his involvement was enough to warrant severe punishment.

Jim enters, casually stepping on the throat of the man McCoy said might live, crushing down with his heel. Bailey makes a noise like a squeak. Leonard smiles and steps outside to call someone to clean the mess up.

McCoy gets the pieces, the shell of a man who, just a few hours ago, thought he could have it all, to play with. When he’s just about finished, blood running and screams echoing (quite the achievement, seeing as he cut out his tongue halfway through), he cuts out an eye. He croons “Amazing Grace” while he works.

_“… was blind, but now, I see…”_

\--

The collar, on the other hand, is more of a hindrance than a help.

It’s nicely made; Leonard doubts he could break it if he tried, certain that Jim made sure of it. There’s a buckle, but the rules are that he wears the collar when he’s on duty, when walking around the ship, whenever he’s not naked and Jim feels like marking his neck up with teeth and hands and whatever else he feels like on that particular day.

He nearly takes it off just to spite him, but the collar is the least of things Kirk can do (has done), and so he keeps it on. It’s another sign that anyone who wants to touch him should think twice; it quite literally has “Property of James T. Kirk” written on it, and that extends over him like the shields over the _Enterprise_.

Of course, the problem with the shields is that they have a habit of failing at inopportune moments.

It’s another goon from Security, this time; maybe the one Jim put in the Agony Booth, maybe not, but at the moment it doesn’t really matter. What _matters_ is that the man is choking him, yanking on the collar in a way that only Jim has until now, crushing one hand between McCoy and the desk and holding onto the other in a fist that could very clearly break too many of the bones in it for Leonard to be comfortable.

He needs those. Needs his hands, if he’s going to be useful, if he’s going to fucking _survive_ , but if he struggles anymore, his hand (his career, his life) is going to be crushed like a fucking twig, because unless Kirk himself oversees the regeneration process…

He ignores the flickers of uncertainty in his mind at that point, dismissing them as byproducts of the fact that he’s _fucking choking to death_.

He can’t quite ignore the relief he feels when he hears the cold, commanding voice of Jim in the background, and he doesn’t even try to stop the smile that spreads across his face when Jim slits the throat right then and there, ignoring the lingering gaze Kirk gives to his own.

\--

Leonard McCoy, being a man of genius and good taste, makes deals, but none of them are more potent and permanent than the ones he makes with his flesh and sweat and semen while his Captain carves into his chest over and over again.


End file.
